The Male Gaze – the perspective of a notionally typical heterosexual man considered as embodied in the audience or intended audience for films and other visual media, characterized by a tendency to objectify or sexualize women.
“it’s because of the male gaze that female characters are regularly eroticized.”

(Source – Oxford Languages)

Laura Mulvey – a filmmaker and theorist who created the term “the male gaze” in her 1973 paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.

John Berger – an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. In his book Ways of Seeing, Berger observed that ‘according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have no means been overcome – men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’.